This may be something you have not tried. Even though sphereii's mod launcher is fantastic and it is sad that a few do have problems with it, a lot of us here do recall there was a time before there was a mod launcher. Have you ever had a go at manually installing a mod?
It seems daunting at first but it is not so bad. There are plenty of posts about it and just as many people that would most likely help you with it.
You could do like I did and start very slowly. My first experience was just at first adjusting stacks to my liking. I wanted cans of boiled water to stack up to 5 from 1. There, my first modding experience. After that I started adding some HUD mods then as they were offered, full mods.
I eventually came upon Bloodslingers program to change stacks and recipies and have been using that forever. Even though it hasn't been updated for quite a while it still works for me. As a matter of fact it was sphereii who added the link to download it (thanks again sphereii for doing that).
Sphereii's link to Bloodslingers mod.
https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?7910-BloodSlinger-s-Advanced-Recipe-Editor&p=441330&viewfull=1#post441330
I added this post because there were a couple of little things you needed to do at beginning but don't have to do after initial setup
My post showing how to use it.
https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?78330-XML-file-config-suggestions&p=768768&viewfull=1#post768768
After you get use to that then you can move on to manually installing the mod that you want to use. I have been playing the game since 2015 and once I started playing MP game I hardly ever played a SP game again. That meant most times installing a mod. (Note: I could never get sphereii's early version to work on my old computer so all my installs were manual, but he went through hell and high water with me to try and fix it).
So I say hang in there. Install mods old way if you have to and have fun with the game.
To sphereii......sorry I hijacked your thread for this.
(Wow, typed all this in notepad and pasted it after...did not know it would become a huge wall of text...sorry again)